The Dark Place

Fran stared at the pitch-black cave entrance, thinking she might have found the place.

She had followed the river for a while and spotted a dark area by its bank. She couldn't see a thing inside.

"This should be the place, right? The dark area."

Even though there were some glowing stones nearby, their light vanished the moment it reached this area. That didn't quite line up with how light was supposed to travel.

Fran gazed into the darkness, thinking she should go in and take a look. There might really be something inside.

So she went in, holding the short sword she had just stolen in one hand and the tattered book in the other.

Once inside, she found that she could only see things within three meters. Anything farther away was invisible.

And after she had walked more than three meters in, the light behind her was no longer visible.

Fran took a deep breath and continued onward. Fortunately, there were no obstacles in her way, so she could keep walking in a straight line. To be safe, she casually carved a few marks into the stone wall.

After walking for a while, she realized that her field of vision had shrunk again. Now she could see only a little more than two meters ahead.

But she still didn't back down and kept moving forward.

"Hm?"

At that moment, she glanced at the book in her hand and noticed it was glowing faintly. Fran opened it.

The words she had seen the first time had appeared again on the first page. She still couldn't read them.

The characters seemed almost alive: they appeared on the page, then flowed away and vanished.

Then a sentence suddenly appeared in her mind.

"My god will illuminate their believers..."

Right afterward, she felt that she had learned a skill called [Light Prayer].

Fran hurriedly checked her Panel and saw [Light Prayer] listed under skills.

[Light Prayer (Mastered) (Proficiency: 76/1000): You can emit a light that illuminates the darkness.]

Fran's pupils contracted. Why did the skill already have a proficiency level of Mastered?

She had never encountered anything like this before. She stopped and thought it over.

She had just heard that sentence appear in her mind, and she had taken the book from a place that looked like a church.

So, did a 'god' give me this skill? The thought occurred to Fran, and it seemed quite likely.

"So, should I use it or not?"

Fran knew that her field of vision would probably keep narrowing as she went on, and now the book had suddenly given her some kind of skill that could illuminate the darkness.

It was obviously telling her that the skill would be useful in this situation, but she didn't know what side effects using it might have.

After weighing it over, she decided to use it. She trusted what Teacher Ichi had told her: her connection to the Spirit Realm was too weak right now, so there was almost nothing that could hurt her.

"Light Prayer."

A ball of light appeared in her palm, illuminating much more of her surroundings. At last, she could see so much more.

"Hmm, I think I can throw it."

She tossed the ball of light forward. It rolled to a stone wall and stopped, illuminating the area around it.

"That's pretty good."

She didn't feel any different. It seemed like she could throw out a hundred or so of these light balls.

The Gloom Lizard was a Spirit Realm creature commonly found in dark areas.

Its night vision was excellent, allowing it to see things ten meters away in the darkness.

Some of the materials used to make night-vision potions came from hunting these lizards in the Spirit Realm, then bringing their eyes to the Material Realm through a special method and processing them as ingredients.

A Gloom Lizard was currently lying in wait in a dark section of the Jade Corridor. It awaited Spirit Realm Travelers who came looking for jade in the darkness, ready to ambush and kill them.

It crawled almost silently. Spirit Realm Travelers often didn't realize a large monster was beside them until it had crept close.

As a Spirit Realm creature, it didn't need to obtain food from nature or find a safe home the way creatures of the Material Realm did.

The Spirit Realm had created it, and from the moment it was born, its entire life had been devoted to serving the workings of the Spirit Realm.

It always felt a kind of hunger that drove it to attack any Spirit Realm Traveler who entered its territory.

It could sense that if it successfully hunted ten Spirit Realm Travelers, the Spirit Realm would reward it by strengthening its body.

If it could hunt a hundred Spirit Realm Travelers, it would gain ownership of this dark region and become a Domain Lord.

Its entire life had been made for this purpose. It had no other motivation. Only after ascending to Domain Lord would it be granted the intelligence to think about anything else.

Its body lay against the ground as it focused on listening for sounds in the distance.

The dark region was so vast that even its night vision often failed to find the Spirit Realm Travelers who entered it.

After it had happened to hunt three Spirit Realm Travelers, it had somehow awakened the ability to hear sounds throughout this dark region, allowing it to sense targets from far away.

This target seemed different from the previous ones. They had always moved slowly, but this one was walking very fast.

Every so often, the target also threw things against the wall, making noise.

It knew this target might be unusual, but it didn't abandon its pursuit just because the target behaved strangely. As soon as a target appeared, it chased after them.

When it tried to creep up beside the target for a surprise attack, it realized it couldn't catch up!

As everyone knew, moving silently and moving quickly generally couldn't be combined. An apprentice-tier creature definitely couldn't do both.

For the first time, its brain encountered a situation where it couldn't catch up to its target, and it spent quite a while thinking.

In the end, its hunger for the target overcame everything else. It sped up, making quite a bit of noise.

When it was about twenty meters from the target, it was still spotted. It had no chance to slow down again before reaching them.

It heard the target stop abruptly and stand still.

In this situation, all it could rely on was the instinct of a Spirit Realm creature: once discovered, it would charge straight at its prey. It lacked the intelligence to briefly retreat and delay its attack.

As it continued charging toward the target, a spot directly ahead in its field of vision suddenly became invisible. It didn't know how to deal with this and just kept going.

But as it pressed forward, it felt a sharp pain in its eyes. Everything went dark, and its body seemed to collide with something spherical.

The pain also made it impossible to focus on the target's sounds, and it felt itself losing its sense of direction.

Then an attack ripped its body apart, leaving it unable to move. A minute later, the corpse disappeared, leaving behind a blue jade stone.